Operation and maintenance centers (OMCs) are as such known from the prior art for a variety of telecommunications systems. For example the GSM mobile telecommunications system specifies an OMC.
International Patent Application No. WO-A-9826614 discloses a typical radio communication system with base stations, at least one base station controller, and an OMC at the network side. The base station contains transceivers which are connected to an antenna unit, as well as a base-station-related local operations and maintenance unit. In the base station, a control unit handles the selective switching of a transceiver means to a communication connection. The transceivers can be automatically controlled either by the base station controller, the network-side OMC, or by the base-station-related operations and maintenance unit, so that they are in an operative state or in a stop state, respectively.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,360,106 shows a base station for a radio communications system. A controller of the base station performs monitoring and organization of the transceivers. An OMC belongs to the mobile radio system, in which center a management of the configuration, the software, and the performance parameters, as well as the management of the arising errors is carried out. To this end, error messages and messages about operational and performance conditions of the components of the mobile radio system arrive in the OMC.
The main functionality of the OMC is to evaluate the data of the individual base stations such that a continuous radio-technical coverage is ensured over the entire extent of the mobile radio network and replacement and change over mechanisms are controlled for the failure of individual transceivers. This is called Configuration Management. In general one OMC can manage the entire mobile radio system or only subcomponents of the mobile radio system.
US statutory invention registration H 1,896 shows a network management system server and method for operation for a telecommunications system. The network management system integrates the functionality of an OMC.
A variety of OMCs is commercially available for different kinds of telecommunications systems such as GSM and UMTS. Typically an OMC provides a user interface to enable an operator to monitor network performance, capacity, security and configuration. The user interface serves to display network element state and parameter values, network over-views by category and network geography as well as object relationships.
The main function is configuration management. This enables an operator to access and modify network elements and parameters. The other functions of a typical OMC are fault management, performance management and security management.
Each function needs to operate on an individual or a set of network elements. Instead of directly addressing the network elements, mediation component called ‘Resource managers’ is usually required.